PRICE CHECK ON REGISTER THREE

PRICE CHECK ON REGISTER THREE

“Price check on register three” spoke the plea for help over the store intercom system.  “Oh, just let it go,” said the customer to the clerk, then checked out, and hurriedly left the store.  I chuckled to myself… “Yep, I’ve done that a few times!”

Have you ever come away from a worship service or a specific study group and said, “Hmm, I didn’t quite get that message?”  or “I’m just not connecting the dots in what was taught today.”  Can you relate to this?

Our tendency is to ‘let it go’ without pursuing an understanding of what we don’t grasp.  We deprive ourselves of learning important truths which could drastically affect our lives when we let it go unchallenged.

I recall one of our ministry outreaches, where, at the culmination of the Bible being taught chronologically, several people came to the teacher and said, “We didn’t understand several of the points you made today; could you re-teach us those points so that we can understand them?”

Try envisioning this at your church –someone telling the pastor or teacher that they didn’t understand a specific truth and that they want to be re-taught in a way that could help them to understand.  Why, I imagine the speaker would be in such shock that we would have to call a paramedic!

The desire to know and understand as expressed in the story above was hinged upon the people’s grasp of understanding the gospel.  They wanted to be clear in their thinking that the gift of grace was free, and without cost.  They just had to know, and so they asked their questions.

I wonder where we stand in our grasp of understanding that there are millions of people who have never heard of Jesus; that there are those who do not know the salvation story of his death, burial  and resurrection; and that such ones who never hear the message will perish forever unless we do something to reach them. 

As missions mobilizers we are here to rally the church to the task of making Christ-followers among the nations, and specifically to the unreached peoples of the world.  Perhaps we need a check on register three in the church… “Lost ones need to be reached with the gospel; who will go?”  It’s something we must do; we cannot just ‘let it go.’